In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

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But I suspect this will be one of the most difficult roles of his life. I've been watching and trying to make sense of it all.

At first, he was fiercely resistant to the idea, claiming that he had written his own autobiography only because he’d got wind that a journalist was planning an unauthorised life story. Controlling the narrative was paramount. Over time, though, he started to come around to the idea, as long as he could, in his words, “correct everything” that I’d got wrong.I didn’t tell my mother until nearly 15 years after the assault, and never told my father. How many more older women and men have endured feelings of guilt and shame for decades, and how many more will continue to do so? Although already well advanced on becoming one of history’s most prolific criminal sex offenders, Savile shows a peculiar proclivity for public near-confession. In his book God’ll Fix It, he admits to being “an abuser of things and bodies and people”, a formula that can in retrospect allude to both sexual abuse and necrophilia (“bodies” and “people” are oddly differentiated). Davies confesses in the book that, for a long time – before the truth about Savile came out, while he was still obsessed with his dark side but didn't know what it was – he wondered if Savile had murdered someone. But then, given the nature of his transgressions, including the latest from the NHS inquiry at Leeds infirmary, which found allegations of necrophilia, and the instances of violence cited in the book, it's hard to know what he would stop at.

Clare was right: there was something a lot more than chilling about Savile. Following Savile’s death in 2011, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse were made against him, leading to multiple enquiries. While it was noted that Savile was no longer alive to present a defence, a 2013 report by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and the Metropolitan Police, entitled Giving Victims a Voice, was emphatic. My abiding memory was I was really glad I had a photographer with me. He was undoubtedly a showman and was all for posing in bed – but his conversation was peppered with innuendo and he made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. If the BBC can show a Savile story, I can, perhaps should, tell mine. Because the true story is his victims, and how the BBC, Department of Health, Conservative party, Catholic church, police forces, local councils and libel law let them down. I had glimpses of him in action; they live for ever with the consequences of a monster for whom the British establishment – political, royal, broadcasting, ecclesiastical, medical, charitable – provided a dazzling shield.The interviews began to last for days, not hours. He invited me to stay with him and, on one occasion, I was afforded the “honour” of sleeping in the bedroom he kept as a shrine to his mother, Agnes, who he referred to as “the Duchess”. The room, with its tiny single bed and cupboard filled with her clothes, draped in polythene covers, was a capsule representing what ultimately mattered to Savile. Plain turf is all that marks Savile’s grave at Woodlands Cemetery in Scarborough. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images In God'll Fix It, a slim volume of his thoughts on religious affairs, he stated how he believed that life consisted of credits and debits. What came over to me most strongly from reading this book was that JS was a hugely manipulative individual – cultivating the parents of young teenage girls so that they thought nothing of it when he went off on his own with their daughters. When the girls subsequently told their parents of the assaults they were not believed because JS was a friend and wouldn’t do anything like that.

The closing credits include the statement "Based on extensive research, interviews and based in part on the book 'In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile' by Dan Davies" (56:14 on iPlayer) In addition to being a huge celebrity he also cultivated relationships at all levels of British society which included members of the Royal family, and Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister. He was also given the run of three hospitals and was able to lure children to his car, flats, caravans etc. No wonder he considered himself untouchable and, despite many a close call, and even dropping heavy hints in interviews, he got away with abuse on a horrendous scale.The character of Davies brought a questioning presence, and Savile's answers to him in the drama show Savile as an unreliable narrator to his own life," he told press. "We counterpoint the dishonest narration that he gives with the reality from the survivors." Clare was a great guy, a very elegant interviewer . . . It was one of the best interviews I’ve ever had, no doubt. Clare’s questions penetrated my life, my psyche, and my psychological make-up. He was bang-on.”

He told me that when a journalist had tried in the early 1970s, he’d rushed out his autobiography, written in longhand in a series of exercise books. As I later discovered, getting his version of events into print first was a long-standing modus operandi. A measure of Savile’s psychopathy is that the Discovery film can be considered relatively restrained for ignoring the widespread rumours, reflected by Dame Janet Smith, of Savile also being a necrophiliac (his charitable service included working as a hospital morgue porter). The voiceover suggests there was a “huge multi-institution cover-up”, implicating Duncroft House, the Thatcher government, hospitals, prisons and the BBC. Jones argues that numerous managers at the Corporation “must have known”. (My own view, based on the prevalence of Savile rumours during 30 years working at the BBC, is that senior managers of the relevant periods, if they really never heard anything, should urgently book consultations with an audiologist.) It would be a few more years until we would comprehend just how unsettling this icon of TV really was. The Savile series featuring Steve Coogan as the disgraced star is doubly fascinating for me.The intimacy of the discussions undoubtedly heightened the emotional temperature in the small BBC studios where they were recorded. In pursuing these themes over the following years, Clare was unfailingly courteous and supportive with his guests, listening for the most part, rather than interrogating. Another oddity of Savile’s TV CV is that the most influential film about him has never aired. In December 2011, two months after Savile died, a planned BBC Two Newsnight investigation into rapes and assaults by the presenter at Duncroft House, a a school for emotionally disturbed teenage girls in Surrey, was pulled. The producers’ view was that the BBC feared a tonal clash with Savile tribute films in the Christmas schedule. A quasi-independent inquiry, the Pollard Review, broadly cleared managers of that charge, though it found their actions “flawed”; some editorial figures were moved by the BBC to equivalently paid alternative roles.